Sub-threshold strangeness production measured with HADES

Abstract

At energies below sNN≈2.55GeV, strange quarks cannot be produced in binary nucleon-nucleon collisions because of the higher production threshold of the lightest hadrons carrying strangeness. Hence, the investigation of sub-threshold strangeness production in heavy-ion collisions is one of the most promising probes, to access the properties of the created system, as the missing energy must be provided by the latter one. For the first time, a nearly complete set of strange particles has been reconstructed in the 40% most central Au+Au collisions at sNN=2.42GeV. The data sample includes multi-differential representations of charged and neutral particles containing strangeness (K±, Ks0, ϕ, Λ). To achieve a better understanding of strangeness production the properties of the short-lived resonances have to be investigated. The first steps in this direction are presented here, including the reconstruction of baryon resonances using a new iterative technique, comparison to microscopic transport model calculations and interpretation of the pion transverse momentum distribution.